Triumph of a Limousine Liberal

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As a sophomore at UC Berkeley, at the dawn of the Free Speech Movement, Wenner joined a group of radical students that called itself SLATE. But the membership! "A lot of beards, thrift-shop wardrobes, work boots, and bad breath." Make no mistake: For Jann Wenner bad breath is a deal-breaker, even when the proletariat is trying to wrest control of the means of production. "You are so bourgeois," his fellow revolutionaries told him. And the revolutionaries were right (about him being bourgeois, not about the means of production). It’s a fine line Wenner walked, all through the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, as a loud advocate for the more enjoyable parts of the ’60s revolution. He was strongly in favor of sexual libertinism, drug legalization, anti-militarism, and the redistribution of everyone’s wealth but his own. He was also in favor of building up a successful publishing business, crushing the competition, acquiring private aircraft, buying many, many houses, filling a warehouse with fancy cars, and amassing a personal fortune in the low-to-mid eight figures. Before long, Jann Wenner had leapfrogged the bourgeois altogether and become not a radical but a limousine liberal. The phrase has a quaint feel today, perhaps because the type became so unavoidable. "Limousine liberal" was a term coined back in the ’60s to distinguish a new kind of leftish figure. A limousine liberal wasn’t a committed ideologue like Dorothy Day or Saul Alinsky; nor was he descended from the rank and file of the Democratic Party, those horny handed sons of toil: prairie farmers, union members, ethnic partisans of big city political machines, the sorts of people you might suspect of having bad breath. Indeed it was a Democratic machine hack from New York who first invented the term as pejorative. His target was John Lindsay, the leftwing mayor of New York City in the late ’60s (and a Republican!). As the father of limousine liberalism, Lindsay counted as his most loyal constituency the wealthy residents of the Upper East Side of Manhattan. They were vocally committed to racial solidarity, economic justice, heavy government regulation, all that jazz—so long as nobody gave their chauffeurs and cooks any fancy ideas. Over the last 50 years, roughly the lifespan of Rolling Stone, the defection of the white (and now, increasingly, the Hispanic) working class from the Democratic Party left limousine liberals a lot of room for redecoration. They turned the party into a kind of performance space, a stage for striking moral poses and issuing political mandates that always seem to require more from their fellow citizens than from themselves. The well-to-do activists of the Democratic Party, lucky them, get to have their Ben and Jerry’s Groovy Tie Dye Ice Cream Cake and eat it too. The meat-and-potatoes liberalism that shaped the party of Wenner’s youth seems a distant dream. It’s hard to imagine Eleanor Roosevelt posing in a backless number at the Met Gala or George Meany canvassing Martha’s Vineyard for John Kerry’s presidential campaign, as Wenner and his pal Larry David did in 2004. Politics is not the central theme of Wenner’s memoir, but the evolution of his political identity is one of the things that makes the book interesting. From those early days, when he was made uneasy by the radicals who lived and breathed (ugh) their causes, he has grown into an exemplar of his class and his party. On the very first page of the book he writes: "It was clear that my own story, the saga of Rolling Stone, and the breadth and depth of its horizon could be a great read, and a historically authentic way of telling the story of my generation, our times, and my own mission." This sentence is an excellent example of the book’s tone: the banal informality ("a great read") snug against the grandiose ("historically authentic"), wrapped up in preening self-regard ("my own mission"). quote:A great editor requires many qualities—an intuitive understanding of his audience, an ability to spot small stirrings before they become big trends, a taste for good writing, money—but self awareness is not one of them. In a memoir as gossipy as Wenner’s this is less of a handicap than you might think. The reader will figure out what’s going on even if the memoirist doesn’t. Wenner seldom lets more than a few pages go by without a reference to his soul-deep friendship with some rock star or other. Bob Dylan drops by when he’s in town. Bruce Springsteen invites him to his horse farm. Jagger jets in for a sail around the Caribbean. Why, a court order couldn’t keep Paul McCartney or Bono or Jackson Browne away from the radiant pleasure of hanging with their pal Jann. That their pal Jann also just happened to be the editor of their industry’s most important trade magazine—the cover of which generated enough publicity to almost guarantee the success of a new record or tour—is, as Jann himself sees it, an item of no importance in maintaining the spiritual communion he enjoys with these busy, ambitious, calculating, and relentlessly transactional show biz figures. He must be a hoot to be with! His charm, his humor! The sparkle of his conversation! Why else would Bob or Paul or Bruce be so eager for his company? Of course, he usually goes ahead and obliges them with a cover story. What else are friends for? The same obliviousness holds true in his political excursions. Manmade climate change is evidently unaffected by the long flights on his personal jet. He is, who would’ve guessed, a passionate advocate of gun control and the confiscation of private firearms; one chapter is even titled "frick the NRA." But—boy!—was he ever glad his guide on a cross country motorcycle trip was packing heat to protect him from the rednecks that infest the land between the coasts. (In fairness, I should add that the guide didn’t have to shoot any of them.) He bravely condemned the "greed" unleashed by Ronald Reagan and other Republicans. Yet even as he tends an ever rising pile of money, fighting for every inch of market advantage, squeezing the best financing rates he can from Wall Street, and slashing payroll to juice profits, he never succumbs to greed himself. Greed is one of those terrible character flaws that only afflicts other people. Most of them, thank God, do not have summer compounds in Montauk. Like most great magazines, Rolling Stone not only fed off its readers’ enthusiasms but in time began to shape them too. In the early days, as the magazine’s and Wenner’s success grew, a debate stirred among the hippies about "whether making money, or more than you needed, was wrong." Could there be such a thing as "hip capitalism"? In nearly 600 pages of memoir, Wenner doesn’t answer the question directly—he was never good at making arguments, as he proved in the many pompous, moralizing editorials he wrote for the magazine and insists on quoting here. His life was his answer—a resounding "Hell yes!" The same market economy he disdained in theory could be squeezed in practice for unlimited financial gain. The radicalism that Wenner flirted with in his youth and quickly rejected requires a kind of self-denial, even asceticism, that couldn’t withstand the constant allurements to which he happily submitted. By contrast, he writes, "I believed in a revolution of culture and consciousness." Good choice! That kind of revolution is a is a much lighter lift than a revolution in economic arrangements, and much more fun.

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Cliffs for all that?

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